Death in Siberia

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THE FOOTSTEPS BEHIND him seemed to be getting closer. To Gunther Bachman – or Herr Professor Gunther Bachman, to give him his full title – they had become a constant threat.

He heard the slap slap slap of the steps again now on the wet concrete of the Siberian street. Bachman’s reaction was a constriction in his heart, a shortness of breath. For in Gunther Bachman’s alternately declining and rising tide of panic, the steps had begun to seem like the approach of his own execution.

He’d read somewhere about false executions. In Vietnam, was it? No, it was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. They were a particularly Oriental variation of cruelty, as Professor Bachman had understood it.

But that was what this torture of the footsteps in this Siberian city had become, as night began to fall like the lowered hood of the executioner himself. He may not have been strung up with a rope around his neck, only to be allowed to fall half-alive to the ground, as they’d done to their victims in Cambodia. But what was following him in the driving rain through the ever more obscure maze of streets contained the same terrifying promise.

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